An Exhausting Trip Back In Time

It’s summer cleaning time again.

My roommate and I have been very tight friends since junior high – we were boarding-school roommates back then. Many sleepovers made our mothers good acquaintances too. Now that we are sharing an apartment again, one of our mothers always comes for a visit sometime in the summer to make sure we are not buried under our own materialistic consumption and laziness – in other words, they come to clean the apartment for us.

Of course, being the good daughters that we are, we always try to at least make it presentable beforehand; and of course, being the typical mothers that they are, it’s never enough. Although each time I get the same comment (“how can you even do anything in a place like this?”), I’d like to think that we are improving each year. This year in particular, I’ve booked someone to clean the kitchen and wash the carpet the day before my mother’s arrival, and I even plan to do a broken furniture disposal the day before that. Now, the only thing left for me to do is to organize things around so that my carpet would show.

Which is not as easy as it sounds.

In my defense, my room is really far from horrible, especially compared with most of my friends. However, I am not entirely without problem:

For one thing, I have a mild compulsion for buying books whenever I’m under stress. Unfortunately, I don’t read as fast as I buy them. I also like to reread good books a lot, and I have a great issue with getting rid of unread books – which altogether means there are more books than I have room for.

I also have a thing for notebooks. I have many pretty notebooks that are empty because I don’t have that many things to write about. Especially since I’m a rather fast typer and a horrible speller, most notebooks I bought, I bought for pure aesthetic reasons. It’s like a dress so resplendent you know you’ll never wear, but you have to have it just to lighten up the wardrobe.

So where to begin …

As usual, I start with piling up my old assignments and handouts from school for recycling. I had many pleasant surprises along the way – bad sketches on the margins of my notes, which I thought were masterpieces back then; ideas I believed were ingenious but were never carried out; fragments of stories I wrote, that hardly make any sense now but it’s always interesting to try to figure out what was on my mind at the time.

It was not easy to throw them away. These ideas, random thoughts, paper-full of words, horrible sketches… I spent time on them. They were a part of me, and by throwing them away; I fear that they’ll never come back.

It was by then I started to understand the idea of hoarding. Of course, compulsive hoarding is a mental disorder and the hoarders’ ideas of keepsakes usually go way beyond our imagination. However, the underlying idea is the same – we want to hold on to ourselves, as much as we can.

As I force myself to be more and more responsible, my notebook consumption has been cut down significantly. However, I still have more unread books than a person can read, and many read books that I should probably let go. I guess everybody has one or two things they always find emotional comfort with – be it clothes or dolls or stamp collections – that are really hard to let go of. My obsession with books may make me sound like a scholar, (of course, it would be better if I actually read all of my books), but fundamentally it’s not that different from all the other obsessions people may have. I value their presence more than their function, and it is, for the most part, irrational.

But people are not meant to be entirely rational. As I put some of my unread books into a bag, preparing for a trip to the used bookstore, I realized that I could never deny how much comfort the sight of these unopened books have brought me. They, like many other things that have happened in my life, use to be a part of me. Now I have to leave them behind.

Maybe that part of me will never be found, but I can always get something new. As I promise myself (yet another time) stop overbuying, I am really looking forward to my mother’s arrival. And of course, I hope she can change her comment a little this year.